Usage

The latex maven plugin is to create artifacts of various formats from latex sources. Also graphic files with a broad variety of formats can be included, but these are auto-detected. The same is true for bibliographies, indices, glossaries and embedded code.

So the user has to specify only the desired output formats. As illustrated by example, with the goal cfg artifacts with more than one output format can be created from a single source. To that end the targets must be specified. For each of these targets there is a goal with the same name which represent a single target.

Goals dvi, pdf, xdoc, rtf, odt, html and txt are specialized to the according output format. Note that goal

  • dvi is to create DVI files except for xelatex which creates XDV file instead.
  • xdoc cannot only create XDOC files but also files in the older DOC format.
  • html can create besides HTML files also XHTML files.

A special role plays goal chk which performs a check only and creates nothing but a log file which is of course not deployed.

The other goals, which cannot serve as target, are useful in conjunction with tools external to this software and with debugging or document development

  • Goal clr to cleanup as illustrated for cleanup.
  • Goal inj serve to inject files, above all config files. The various fields of applications are explained by example.
  • Goal grp is to create graphic files creating graphic files.
  • Goal vrs to check versions of the tools to be invoked as described in displaying versions.

Source code repository

https://github.com/Reissner/maven-latex-plugin

Maven repository

<project>
  <pluginRepositories>
    <pluginRepository>
      <id>latex-maven-plugin-repo</id>
      <url>https://www.simuline.eu/RepositoryMaven</url>
      <releases>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
      </releases>
    </pluginRepository>
  </pluginRepositories>

</project>

Maven plugin dependency

<project>[xml]
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>eu.simuline.m2latex</groupId>
        <artifactId>latex-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Document Development

Document development means the process of cyclically modifying and checking a document until it reaches the desired level of quality, maturity and completeness. In a sense this is in contast to a build tool like this one, which focusses on the final build applied to a final version. The classical tool for this task is latexmk in particular invoked with option -pvc for continuous view. Noteevertheless, this latex builder offers extensive although indirect support for document development (see PDF manual).

One of these aspects is creation of a .latexmkrc configuration file for latexmk taking the settings of this latex builder into account so that using latexmk yields the same result as building with this latex builder. Moreover, latex builder may delegate the build process to latexmk, either in general or for selected TEX files, although this is not the rule. The .latexmkrc for latexmk is in fact created from a template by replacing $[&lt;name&gt;] by the actual setting given by &lt;name&gt;.